A blog about my landscape image making. On landscape imaging in general, bits of history and related disciplines (Architecture, Geography, Neuro Science, Philosophy and whatever happens to get my attention)

2011-01-11

Trainscape #2. Notes on "The New Topographics" exhibit part 2

The New Topographics in Linz. Part 2

In the previous post I’ve reported some short impressions about the exhibit. I do no want to dig too much into the singularity of each photographer. Each of them is well documented and easy to look after from several Internet sources. Instead I think that its the exhibit as a whole that may be more interesting to comment. I’ve already praised its historical value but is there anything else ? I’m not sure. The more I think about it the more it seems that the exhibit does not come to a point of having a neat contour. In a good approximation I think that this is also its main value, in this perspective the exhibit somewhat mirrors exactly the state of photographic academy, in it’s beginnings, at the time. More it feels a bit like almost everything from the sixties/seventies of the last century. A time when many discovered that truth was not an absolute thing but instead a subjective, relativistic, artifact. It is not clear, however, if that understanding was produced by an unwanted side effect of consumerism applied to the schooling masses along with the need to give away some spending ability to every body or, instead, was intentionally achieved.

Trainscapes

In its introduction to the Critique of Judgement Immanuel Kant strongly advises the philosopher to never look at what others are saying about the same questions upon which one is about to elaborate. Generally I apply strictly this advice to my creative activities. However in this case I decided to do some searches of “trainscapes” in google images and I’ve found a very interesting precursor: Walker Evans who took several pictures from a train giving the same name to his work progressively published in the LIFE magazine.